Rebecca opened the lion's maw, managed to look into its mouth, and saw how big its teeth were. The Turkish modir now stood up and started lashing himself with a turbatsh and Rebecca, who didn't know what language the lion spoke, ordered it in Arabic, which she thought was closer to its language than any other language she knew, to roll over and play cat for her. The lion did as she ordered and to the spectators, who may have invented some of it, its movements looked like coquettish rotating movements and some versions have it that even its roar sounded like a cat's meow, but Zosha clearly remembers that in the conversation about that subject, various opinions were expressed about the purring, since a Turkish cat whines yeow and a Hebrew one yooo and an English one meow, so there was no consensus about whether the poor lion whined like a cat, and the lion, who apparently smiled at Rebecca, lay on its back and then got up and roared and she didn't budge until it walked in front of her, knelt, turned its face, and she stroked its mane, straightened her dress, wiped off a few pieces of straw that had stuck to it, and said: No blood and fire, no hope, this is a place of circuses and Jews, there's nobody to erect a kingdom of Judea for here, Michael Halperin, there's no reason, and she went out of the cage. The doctor Zosha Merimovitch, who was then a little boy, trembled with fear when he heard the story and people told how Michael Halperin then went to Rebecca, bowed to her as he had once bowed to the lion, and she said to him, The lion of Judah bows to a miserable lady of exile? And in a mocking voice, she went on: You're a funny Jew, Halperin, go save another nation in another place, but never mind, you're the closest thing to a lion I've seen since the Wondrous One was here and taught the fools in the settlement how to smell the feet of robbers who went through the field. Grand pianos they've now bought for their daughters, and she left.
The doctor, now a grown-up, waited for Ebenezer. Now and then he peeped at her house but never managed to see her. And she refused to go to doctors. He waited for the bold fellow, the hybrid of Michael Halperin, Rebecca Schneerson, and Nimrod the hero. His contempt for Ebenezer was perfect, he treated him without looking at him.
The Captain moved to the nearby settlement, which was big and rather close to both Jaffa and Jerusalem, and the door of his house said: Captain J.M.A.G., Citizen of the United States, Argentina, French Editor, Please do not visit on Sunday and Wednesday. The Captain's trip to Cairo was postponed again and again and every Wednesday he would ride to the settlement to visit Rebecca, sit in her house, tell her about his plans, and give her a most discouraging account of the irrigation plan for the Middle East she had devised and still expected to realize, even though for some time now she didn't remember why she had ever devised that plan. The Captain didn't give up his idea of marrying Rebecca. He listened patiently to her tribulations, the story of her weeping for eight years, the story of her life with Nehemiah and her tribulations with her stupid son, who goes to a doctor who probably studied horse doctoring in Beirut, to put iodine and a bandage on his face. For some reason, the Captain saw the story of her going into the lion's cage as overwhelming proof that she would marry him someday. Because she could never understand the disposition of the Captain's ostensibly logical connections, she took the words literally and learned how to go on refusing him politely. She would say her "no" pensively as if she meant "yes," while gazing softly at the Captain's increasingly pale face, and so she could keep his hope on a back burner and know that every Wednesday he would come visit her to propose new ideas to her and some of them really weren't bad, like building the airport years later.
While Rebecca was pondering how much alike were the Wondrous One, Joseph, the Captain, and the German officer who played songs for her during the war, new settlers came to the settlement. The Turkish modir, who was banished from the Land by the British, sent her a love letter from Istanbul and the manager of the wine press started sending love letters with shipments of brandy he would send to her home. The economy improved, new rest homes were even built for rheumatics since the air of the place was good for them. Roads were paved and the settlement was enveloped in thick green foliage, and there were corners where the sun never penetrated, and Rebecca went on protecting her son at a limited distance of time and space. One day a young teacher came to the settlement from Tel Aviv whose name was Dana Klomin. She brought twelve little children to show them the pit of the first settlers, which they had started digging next to the synagogue some years before. In the community center hung pictures of the early days and one of the farmers took the children on a tour of the community center and showed them the pit, Roots, and told about the tribulations, the torments, and the malaria. He told about Nathan and Nehemiah and the Wondrous One who came riding from the Arabian deserts to teach war. The teacher Dana was short, round, handsome in the unaccepted meaning of the word-as Rebecca put it-her eyes were gray, and when she twisted her ankle on a tour of the Hill of Tears, she was taken to the home of Zosha Merimovitch the doctor, who knew her father in Tel Aviv, and when he fixed her heel and bandaged it she saw on the windowsill a bird made of wood that Ebenezer had brought the doctor as a sign of gratitude for his cure. She looked at the bird in amazement, and said: That's a bird of paradise, it almost flies and doesn't fly, like me, who carves such a handsome bird? The doctor, who never caught on that there was anything special about the bird or Ebenezer, refused to see and turned his face away when he'd come to him, put the bird on the windowsill because he didn't know where to put it, said: That bird was made by Ebenezer Schneerson, who sits alone in the citrus grove and carves.
The children were resting in the Horowitz home. Dana Klomin limped slowly to the citrus grove. It was a beautiful day, and she deluded herself that she was going because of the beautiful day and the charming and pleasant view, but what led Dana Klomin, whose ankle hurt, was the rare sight of the bird. Dana's father believed in one thing only-in the charter. He thought he was the only one who still followed in the path of the greatest Jew of our generation, Theodor Herzl. He was excited by the Hebrew kingdom modeled on Rome, with a senate and an enlightened king, and for him Zionism wasn't only a solution to the distress of the Jews-or returning them to their homeland-but also an act of legal and historical justice. Mr. Klomin thought the Land was empty of people, the Arabs who lived in it were accidental wayfarers, no one ever called that land by name except the Jews, he said excitedly. It wasn't the homeland of any nation, no city was a capital for them, only the longings of the Jews preserved the Land from total disappearance, he claimed. He quoted Disraeli, who said in his book Tancred. "The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the Children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persist its celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards."
A plot of land without declaring a historic homeland, without a flag, an anthem, or a legal system, was merely an aftermath of nothing. The emptiness of the Land was the implementation of an essentially ahistorical political mishap that demanded legal correction, a kind of leadership fraud, and the proud Israeli nation had to accept the charter for the Land of Israel and establish a strong and enlightened kingdom there on the European model and not on the savage Asian one, establish a supreme court there, a parliament, a decent and consistent constitution, enact a law of languages allowing only Hebrew and ancient Latin and the Hebrew army that would arise would establish those points of Zionist settlement that Jewish poverty had established so far without any real vision or proper planning. Zionism had to be made into a profitable business, he argued with the fervor of a person incited by an idea that nobody can or will take seriously. He was just as disappointed in his daughter as Rebecca was in her son. Like Rebecca, he also hoped his grandson might follow in his path. He had ideas about breeding his daughter, an expression he himself adopted, with a scion of the house of David, but the only scion of the house of David, Mr. Joseph Abravanel, seemed cheap, Levantine, and devoid of greatness, and the son was even dumber than his father. Mr. Klomin even thought of trying to marry his daughter off to some European prince, but since he didn't know who to appeal to in the matter, he didn't do anything. Dana, who had lost her mother, attended teachers' college and all she wanted to do was dry flowers, teach, and give birth to her own children so they would also love to smell flowers. She loved the settlements, hated Tel Aviv, which had grown and was noisy and pretentious now, she read old novels in yellowing bindings and dreamed of the simple and beautiful life in the lap of nature. She loved everything beautiful created by man or nature. She hated her father's big words, but she loved the solitary and stubborn man who raised her after her mother died in childbirth. When he furiously argued to her that what we need are warrior engineers and chemists and jurists and not teachers, Dana said to him: But I love flowers and the smell of rain and a grape harvest, and he twisted his face and shouted: From romanticism you beget stupid children, not a Jewish state after two thousand years, Dana!